Consumers are typically required to use paper tickets for entry to a specific event, such as a football game or the cinema, for example. Traditional paper tickets present many problems and disadvantages. For example, the use of paper tickets often requires consumers to queue up for tickets (e.g., lines at the will call window). Additionally, consumers need to worry about storing their paper tickets prior to entering the event, which is inconvenient. Traditional tickets can be lost, misplaced, or stolen. When this occurs, the consumer typically has no recourse but to buy new tickets. Furthermore, with traditional tickets, consumers may have to deal with scalpers and the risk of purchasing counterfeit tickets.
Portable consumer devices, such as payment cards, may be used in lieu of tickets. However, it would be unsecure and undesirable to have a list of credit card numbers (or other sensitive personal or financial information) stored at a venue or, even worse, at every entrance point to a venue. Additionally, the venue operator must be able to differentiate not only between consumer associated with a payment card or payment account, but the venue operator must be able to differentiate between events to which the consumers is entitled access to, the specific date, time or showing of the event that the consumer is entitled to access, and what level of access the consumer is entitled to, etc. This could be accomplished by maintaining a separate list or database of payment card numbers for each specific event. This would have the undesirable consequence of proliferating the availability of sensitive info, increasing the risk of security breaches, and make the entire system complex and unwieldy. Therefore, a ticketing solution using portable consumer devices in place of traditional tickets, where sensitive personal and financial data is protected in transit and storage, is desired.
Embodiments of the technology disclosed herein address these and other problems, individually and collectively.